Alumni Spotlight: Kate Wojcicka

Kate Wojcicka

Kate Wojcicka completed the Mst in MBCT in 2016. She is based in London and has used MBCT in individual and group client work at various substance misuse charities. She describes below how she first came to be interested in mindfulness. 

Mindfulness entered my life for the very first time in 2009 when I was at the Helping Groups to Grow training, which incorporated CBT and Mindfulness therapeutic techniques in substance misuse and mental health combined interventions for clients. I was doing the training as part of my CPD and my main focus was to learn new tools to bring into my work with clients. I remember that I found the term intriguing and it sparked my natural curiosity further.

One of the homework exercises invited us to ‘do one thing mindfully’ later in the day. I remember being excited about the task and feeling quite confident about it at the time. One might say that ‘ignorance is bliss’ as I had not foreseen what was awaiting me. The task I had chosen to complete in a mindful way was a skype phone call with my sister that evening. I prepared myself, cleared the space around me, sat at my desk and started my computer, when all of the tabs, programmes and folders open from my last session literally jumped at me. I immediately felt lost in the amount of information and images that were coming my way, but I still had some time before the phone call, so I started clearing my digital space up. This was when I realised that the task may be more challenging than I had originally thought. I found it almost impossible to navigate through the clutter in order to stay on track and started to become annoyed by the process. At that moment the phone call came and I had to stop. I remember feeling really unsettled in myself and it took a lot of effort to pull myself out of it. I am a conscientious person though, and as I was given a task to do I decided to follow it fully and locate all my attention on my sister. In the end it was the best and richest conversation we had had in a long while. I noticed being more present, open and listening to what she was sharing. Though it sounds simple the task was not easy. I realised how much I was usually not here. I felt those urges of movement pulling me towards other things that I would usually be doing ‘in the background’ – checking things online, perhaps looking for dinner recipes, whilst soundly nodding in an attempt to cover my distraction.

This experience stayed with me as a very unique and interesting one, but when the course ended I came back ‘to life’ and it become one of my ‘work tools’ to use with clients and almost disappeared from my life.

Mindfulness again reminded myself of its existence when I came across an 8 week Yoga for Mental Health course delivered by The Minded Institute.  The course aimed to bring physical and mental well-being together through yoga practice and mindfulness activities. Remembering my previous encounter and the benefits I experienced I enrolled without hesitation. Sessions proved to be challenging yet equally rewarding, and the discovery of my increased well-being from an activity previously strictly linked to my professional life was again most inspiring. I was all in, and ready to explore the subject further.

At the time it started to feel that mindfulness was all I was hearing about. I came across the ‘Mindful Way Through Depression’ book, my clients were talking about how meditation successfully supported their recovery and further changed their thinking to build a new relationship with themselves which lead to a happier life, and in the support group I was running people wanted to introduce elements of it into weekly sessions. It sounded almost ‘too good to be true’ and since I felt at loss for the last request I decided to consult Dr Google. The search opened a well of possibilities for me to explore. I remember the excitement I felt when I discovered the structured 8 week MBCT course that finally introduced me to the mindfulness approach, allowed me the opportunity to explore it further and helped establish a personal meditation practice.

There were many moments of doubt coincidentally as I was practising more, and new layers kept exposing themselves. Underneath the doubt I surprisingly also discovered a certain level of trust, supported by my good old friend curiosity, to stay with the practice, to persevere. Regular mindfulness practice exposed a conflict between my mind and body, the first questioning everything and activating an army of thoughts to add more doubt, the latter settling into the new way I was learning to practice in order to build up its own supportive voice. This duality of experience felt like agony at times, but there were moments of clarity and calm that started to appear too.

My search completed when I found that there was an MSt in MBCT course at the University of Oxford. Initially I could not believe that there actually was a possibility to study this further – my curiosity had discovered a goldmine – and in such an outstanding environment. Despite the doubt now fully in charge I decided to apply.

Looking back at those two years I remember my initial expectations were for the course to broaden my academic knowledge on the topic and to learn a new therapeutic approach to utilise in my client work. Both turned out to be true, but I gained something much more than that, something I was not expecting at all. The biggest surprise was to realise how personal the journey has been for me. The experiential side of the course took me on a completely new and unexpected journey in my life and one I can definitely say is still ongoing. The learning has been very challenging at times, but each time unravelling new insights and knowledge. Having access to wonderful and supportive teachers sharing their amazing knowledge created a space, where this journey became possible. Each teaching block enriched the knowledge gained from the previous one and the teaching was put together in a very thorough way. It formed a broader sequence, which with time turned into one big piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The course is organised in such a way that it allowed me to appreciate each stage of the learning experience as well as to acknowledge the personal journey that was taking place in parallel.

I feel enormously grateful for this opportunity that has enriched my professional and personal life in ways unimaginable.